Kudos to the fast food chain Burger King (and their marketing team, led by VP Fer Merchado), for making a bold step in addressing the special needs of people with hearing disabilities. To celebrate the most recent American Sign Language Day (on April 15th, 2016), they ran an advertising campaign that directly targeted the deaf, which included overhauling an entire restaurant in Washington DC, and replacing all lettering on their materials with symbols of hand-lettering in ASL sign. It also launched a viral marketing campaign featuring the heretofore silent King, who on video signs to the audience and invites viewers to create a new hand gesture for their Whopper sandwich — the “Whoppersign” — and to post a video of it online with the search tag “#whoppersign.”

The #whoppersign campaign is a wonderful advertising gambit with a fantastic aim: to respect and serve the hearing impaired community. You have to applaud Burger King for marshaling its chinadoll-faced mascot, King, to employ American Sign Language and turn to a higher social purpose. Check out the original video and its backstory, as recently published at AdWeek.

Mental Floss explains why this is progressive advertising: “It differs from many ad campaigns of this type, in that it’s not about a company giving something to a disadvantaged community, but about asking for their input on something. Also, the commercial spends time letting signers explain for themselves what they love about their language, which makes it a perfect contribution to the celebration of National ASL Day.” In other words, there is empowerment through self-expression here, where the consumers are entrusted and given power over the creative messaging.

BK is making a step in the right direction, certainly, but if it weren’t for the warm embrace of the deaf community so far, one could just as easily see this as an exploitative publicity stunt. I prefer to give them the benefit of the doubt, because it does open up a dialogue with the hearing-disabled and it does show that BK is serious in their corporate commitment to diversity and inclusion. But of course it is also very much in their vested interest to not only appeal to a target audience by “speaking their language” in an effort to develop brand loyalty, but it is also crass commercialism to presume that their hamburger deserves something more than a trademark — its own word in the lexicon of ASL. After all, there already IS a sign for hamburger.

How does this relate to the Uncanny?

In a sort of cultural maskaphobia, the masked King character has in recent history become a pop icon that has been aligned with the uncanny quite often (Adam Kostko, for instance, features King as his primary and defining icon of the book Creepiness in mass culture — this great excerpt in the journal, New Inquiry is well worth reading fully). Like many “dolls which come to life” in the literature and film of the uncanny, the commercials for King are always inherently uncanny because his unrealistic mask refuses access to the identity of the person miming behind it, causing us to suspect some “unseen force” — a strangely inhuman-yet-humanlike agency — is at work here with a mind all its own. The “Wake up with the King” TV commercial campaign has been treated as emblematic of this creepiness.

As I frequently have argued, cartoony advertising spokesmodels and mascots (think of animated figures like the Pillsbury Doughboy or Michelin Man) often attempt to embody a corporate entity — a business — as if it were a singular life all its own. This is, actually, what a “corporation” is: an embodiment of an idea. Along the way, repressed desires and secret wishes are “released” or affirmed publicly by them, rendering these dolls a sort of living-dead commodity fetish.

While the “Wake Up” ad literally is a dramatization of “breakfast in bed” served up by a corporate mascot, Kostko reads this commercial as rife with homoerotic tension, triggering a “return of the repressed” sensation, and that clearly is evident in this bedroom scene. From the dominating intimacy of the King lying “in bed” with the consumer to the comedic moment where they hold hands across the man’s knee, the sexual innuendos are everywhere in evidence, displaced onto the closeups on the sandwich as if this fetishism were the consummation of pleasure. Add to the mix a very obvious, yet easy-to-overlook element of social class issues: the topsy-turviness of having a clownish representation of royalty “serve” the common, working class man. What is uncanny about this is not merely (or only) a “return of repressed” sexual desire, but a kind of economic wish-fulfillment as well — a comedic inversion of social roles, implied by the King’s chummy servitude, where a man can be served breakfast in bed by a representative of elite economic power, who in turn is a capitalistic icon of consumer culture. Fitting, then, that it is a food object that is fetishized here as if it were not just sexual, but supernatural. The sandwich is a “double croissandwich” — described in voice over and in replay where the phrase “egg and meat and cheese” is repeated. In other words, we have an uncanny doubling.

In hindsight, looking back at this ad through the context of this week’s campaign in which the King “breaks his silence” through hand sign — it is worth paying attention to how sound actually functions in the “Wake Up with the King” advert. There is birdsong playing as ambient sound while the man in bed is shown sleeping, and we probably don’t even recognize in the background that the King’s regalia is there behind his head, subtly moving with King’s breathing. The “creepy” King is performing something voyeuristic here right from the onset. But if we are situated with the viewpoint of the sleeping man, then the advert begins in a dream state. The man in bed awakens to the shock of reality-as-dream: the fantastic King towering above him.

There is the momentary beat of shock and wonder — what is this creep doing in my bed? what are his intentions? — when the King gently raises his finger in a “hold on, let me show you my croissandwich and explain” sort of gesture. The score plays an uptempo song for the remainder of the ad, characterizing his intent as safe and fun-loving, echoed by the somewhat gravelly and strange voice-over (one we might inherently assign to the King himself by association). But what is interesting to me is that the King DID use hand signals in this early commercial: he always has relied on pantomime; he always already has been gestural.

But the new “whoppersign” campaign has its own uncanny appeal, as it brings together bodies with language through sign language. And there is a strangeness to all this that I would speculate is felt as uniquely uncanny most of all by the deaf consumer, since their special needs are usually ignored by advertising and brand marketing (beyond minimal tokens and expressions guided by the basic legalities)…yet here they suddenly, surprisingly, are spoken to visually by someone who doesn’t speak at all to the typical hearing-abled consumer. This reversal of roles could be experienced like a “secret language” come to life in the public, by the mass market.

When the King was silent, as he mostly has been up to this point, he’s chilled us with paranoid concern about what that king-thing might be thing-king. No longer do we worry what’s on his mind; we don’t attribute suspicious motives to it, since it finally is speaking to us, and it “comes to life” in a new way that is human. The hands divert our attention… they are “real” albeit disembodied (and perhaps oddly thin, long and pale), as they are detached from a “head.” Yet we “know” this is a human in a costume, someone capable of composing and signing language with a mind. When King starts to “speak” with its hands, you may at first feel a sensation of the uncanny, but the longer it “speaks” — and the more we witness it (him?) interacting with others — the safer and more domesticated King becomes. His intentions, implicitly, are pure. The King is not an evil embodiment of weirdness. The suggestion is that he has been a special needs monarch all along. (This would suggest that his Otherness is really a construct of fears by the normative masses all along, too — the masses who, it should come as no surprise, have a long history of representing and often demonizing the disabled as Other. This “ableistOthering” treats people with unfortunate disabilities as abnormal, monstrous, alien or supernatural — something lesser than a socially-normative construct of the Self.)

Is the Uncanniness of the King spokesmodel being culturally turned around to progressive ends? Perhaps, so long as the King and the corporation alike respect the marginalized “voice.”

All things considered, I think the must “uncanny” sensation that this campaign unleashes is located in the nature of the sign itself. Freud has famously written that the uncanny is launched “when the distinction between imagination and reality is effaced, as when something that we have hitherto regarded as imaginary appears before us in reality, or when a symbol takes over the full functions of the thing it symbolizes.” This is precisely what we see when the Burger King sign, logo, and even menu is rewritten in ASL — returned to us language that is “the same” yet “unfamiliar” to the everyday consumer.

And it is doubly estranged to the deaf themselves, who do emotionally-loaded double-takes when they first encounter signs of hand expressions where there “should be” lettering, signs where there once was logo, signs substituting for signs. The uncanny triggers a gasp of pleasure or amazement — as the company breaks through the monolithic presumption of English print language in the form of ASL’s direct address.

It is important that this whoppersign be constructed by the community they are speaking “to.” ASL isn’t written by any one entity just like Webster did not invent the English language. Instead, French sign language was adapted into English and standards emerged in schools for the deaf. The whoppersign, albeit corporate branding, is asking the deaf to create a sign — a phoneme of language — that does not exist, to symbolize their brand of hamburger. That is passing the power of advertising over to the people; it is active culture empowerment, acknowledging and giving “voice” to a segment of the population that is often ignored by mass marketing and literally silenced by the culture, who chooses not to listen. At the same time, it is corporate branding of graphic language in the interest of revising a cultural story about their King icon — reframing his silence as not creepy or uncanny, but merely misunderstood and marginalized.

The Consumer is the King

Whoppersign is not yet settled. There is no “winner” yet, selected by the corporation. I think it is up to the hearing-impaired community to adopt these expressions and conventionalize them. But for now we have an advertising brand name rendered a living, moving entity — a symbol-under-revision — a structure deconstructing in the linguistic system of the popular uncanny. There are many issues with profiteering off the marginalized, too. But what what we seem to have right now is a kind of performance of consumerism, via viral video marketing, as a pantomime of empowerment.

ENERGY (1970): Cover of the “obscure Japanese” journal that first published Mori’s “The Uncanny Valley”

I like to think I’m good at keeping up with research on the Uncanny, but somehow I missed an important event this June: IEEE Spectrum published the first complete English translation of Masahiro Mori’s highly influential article on “The Uncanny Valley” (originally published in what they call “an obscure Japanese journal called Energy in 1970,” and circulating in the robotics community and popular culture in only partial form. This current translation, by robotics experts Karl F. MacDorman and Norri Kageki, has been authorized and reviewed by Mori himself.

Mori’s “Uncanny Valley” theory suggests when a human-like object approaches humanness, there is a point where we respond with repulsion.

Here are my initial notes as I read Mori’s article in full:

+ Movement has a more significant role in the theory than I think people who work with this theory really recognize. In the introduction to the essay, he makes the stunningly simple point that “many people struggle through life by persistently pushing without understanding the effectiveness of pulling back. That is why people usually are puzzled when faced with some phenomenon that this function (an algebraic equation for “monotonically increasing” or accelerating forward movement) cannot represent.” In other words, the “uncanny” is referring to the “puzzling” phenomenology of feeling “pulled back” from a situation where we expect forward motion. I like this, as it gives me another way of thinking of the “double-take” that I associate often with das Unheimliche.

+ Death is conceived as the end of movement. In the end of Mori’s article, he associates this “pulling back” with death itself: “into the still valley of the corpse and not the valley animated by the living dead.” He even goes so far as to theorize that the repulsion of the uncanny is “an integral part of our instinct for self preservation…that protects us from proximal, rather than distal, sources of danger.”

+ One shouldn’t forget that the “Valley” is always symbolic, a metaphor for a sensation. I am struck by Mori’s reliance on metaphors throughout the article…and reminded that the very idea of the “valley” is really a geographic analogy for a dip in his infamous graph. The “sinking feeling” one associates with a dip in the road or the sudden plunge of a roller coaster might be just the right sensation he is after in this. He directly compare the “uncanny valley” to an “approach” of a hiker climbing a mountain who must sometimes traverse “intervening hills and valleys”. Mori thesis statement encapsulates this in a nutshell: “I have noticed that in climbing toward the goal of making robots appear like a human, our affinity for them increases until we come to a valley which I call the ‘uncanny valley'” (emphasis added).

+ Aesthetics and childhood factor into this theory as much as Freud’s. Mori notes that the trend for designing robots that look human really started to pick up in toy robots, rather than in the (perhaps more frightening) factory robots that replace human workers. Obviously, the aesthetics mean more than the instrumental functions of these toys, which are like Freud’s puppets or uncanny dolls. Interestingly, Mori writes that “Children seem to feel deeply connected to these toy robots” and puts them on the top of the first “hill” before the chart dips down toward the deadly “uncanny” valley. What I would note here is that Freud conceives of the uncanny as a return of a repressed or infantile belief that such objects as toys and dolls have life all their own. After the dip of the “uncanny valley” Mori returns to toys by citing the “Bunraku Puppet” as an example. So perhaps Mori’s chart actually follows Freud’s logic to the letter — the dip or valley is the return of the repressed, insofar as it follows the same chronological structure of childhood belief, followed by its later return in adulthood.

+ The focus on hands, rather than faces or heads, is intriguing. Mori focuses on the robotic hand as his primary example: “we could be startled during a handshake by its limp boneless grip together with its texture and coldness…the hand becomes uncanny.” Later Mori develops this by describing a robotic hand as prosthetic limb: “…if someone wearing the hand in a dark place shook a woman’s hand with it, the woman would assuredly shriek.” Note that Sigmund Freud’s original article on the Uncanny (1919) features examples of dismembered limbs and hands that “move of their own accord” as well. The hand is a particularly loaded body part: it is a way we communicate by sign, it is one of the ways that “human” is separated from other members of the “animal” kingdom (by opposable thumb), and it is something we look to as a signifier of intention. Language is rooted in the hand. And it is a metaphor for control (i.e. having everything “in hand”). The Uncanny, as I think of it, is often a phenomena that disorients us and — often as if by an “unseen hand” — reminds us of our lack of mastery in a situation where we normally would presume we had it.

+ As Mori progresses to unpack his theory, the more his descriptions of prosthetic devices become akin to horror fiction. Indeed, he makes the comparison himself: “Imagine a craftsman being awakened suddenly in the dead of night. He searches downstairs for something among a crowd of mannequins in his workshop. If the mannequins started to move, it would be like a horror story.” Indeed, the surprising movement where one expected stillness from the inorganic objects would be startling and felt as uncanny. It would not merely be identity confusion. It would feel as if the robots were attacking. The boundaries between “story” and reality would become blurry. Science would become science fiction “made real.”

I’m sure I’ll return to this article again in the future. For now, of equal interest is Kageki’s contemporary interview with Mori himself also published in the 2012 issue of Spectrum, asking him to look back on the theory. My favorite moment is the when Kageki asks him, “Do you think there are robots that have crossed the uncanny valley?” Mori suggests that the HRP-4C robot is one of them. But then he doubles back and says “on second thought, it may still have a bit of eeriness in it.”

I am so thankful to Mori and the translators for re-releasing this version of the article in English for scholarly review. It has been relatively frustrating to see the essay referred to so often in both the design and gaming community — as well as in scholarly circles — without having access to the complete source, and now that it is available I hope others will continue to test and explore its legitimacy as a way of thinking about horror aesthetics and anthropological design.

Thing (sometimes spelled “Thingg”) — the ambulatory hand that lives in a box and serves as a literal “handyman” to The Addams Family — is perhaps the most uncanny character from a television show that literally domesticated the alien and unfamiliar into the world’s first “gothic” sitcom family and in many ways signaled a watershed moment in the popularization of the Freudian uncanny through post-WWII television broadcast. Indeed, as a dismembered hand, he might as well be torn directly from Freud’s catalog of Das Unheimlich — as one of those “dismembered limbs that move of their own accord” and as such harbor doom and dread…to which I would add laughter, which often is a hallmark of uncanny unease.

In this wonderfully campy commercial from Nikon, we are given all the obvious trappings of the uncanny, beyond just the presence of Thing: the gothic mansion of the Addams’ house, the presence of Vincent Price’s voice, and the opening title (“The Hand with Five Fingers” — riffing off Robert Florey’s classic dismembered hand film from 1946, The Beast with Five Fingers (which no doubt highly influenced Addam’s creation of Thing to begin with). But there are many other strange things going on in this commercial worth brief comment:

Although 1985 was almost thirty years ago, it was an appeal to nostalgia even when it was released. The Addams Family had been in syndication for at least fifteen years by this point (the show aired in 1964), though it would still be another six years or so before the first film adaptation of it (and of Charles Addams‘ original comics, which appeared in the late 1940s). In other words, The Addams Family as it was known in the 80s (and as it is known today) has and is always dislocated in time, and always already a copy of another version of itself. So the commercial is something of a mediated doppelganger.

Part of the humor of this ad is in something that we might neglect to consider: that a hand has no eyes. It doesn’t need them. The camera is privileged as a magical object because it “automatically” sees for him, doing all the work. You don’t need human or artistic agency at all to use the One Touch, is the implied message. Even a corpse could use it. Thus, the supernatural “power” of the camera’s automatic lighting and auto-focus is what is really being treated as uncanny here, through an association with Thing. The magic is available “at the push of a button”…or “at everybody’s fingertips.”

Because film is film, the commercial is highly self-referential, and not only in the Addams Family references. This is a commercial for a camera, shot by a camera, and the latter seeks to hide its own presence. But note how the ad uses black-and-white stock for the commercial, but when Thing takes snapshots of his “frightened” subjects they flash in “freeze frame” on the screen in color. Thus, the photographic images are made more “present” (in current time/color) than what they actually inherently are — moments from the past, captured in time.

It is interesting that viewers — potential consumers — are aligned with the subject position of a free-floating ambulatory limb. It is an agency without identity. In the context of the narrative of the commercial, it is even more interesting that all the photographs are taken of domestic servants (a maid, a butler…) rather than characters who actually appeared in The Addams Family. Now, in the TV show’s narrative, Thing himself (itself?) often performs as one of the family’s servants and is more like Lurch than like Uncle Fester in that regard. So by taking photos of his co-workers, and instilling fear in them, the uncanny commodity that is being pitched implies a sort of power move — a superiority over his fellow laborers — which slyly suggests that if you purchase this camera, you will attain a “magical” status symbol. The clever humor of the commercial and its nostalgic approach to the media masks this rhetoric.

The merchandising of The Addams Family is a wonderful example of the Popular Uncanny, and the strange way that strangeness is domesticated. It is a little sad to see Thing — who actually has some subversive agency on the original show, since he is a metaphor for the alienated worker literally represented as a “thing” instead of a human being — here redefined as an agency of pure consumption. This topic deserves much more attention, and perhaps I’ll come back to it later, but for now I leave you with another commercial that is “uncannily” similar in some ways to the Nikon One Touch.

The wax/flesh boundaries are blurred in unexpected ways in that video that leave even Conan himself speechless about the “horrifying” result. Wax figures may be inherently uncanny on their own, but the status of these figures as pop celebrities — on a pop celebrity show — placed in a men’s room, shifts the ground of the moment enough to render things even more unstable than they otherwise might be.

While searching for this skit online, I came across a classic Conan video featuring “The VentriloChoir in Budapest” that also was quite funny, with hilarious mockery of the human/puppet divide. The band is great, but something about the “mass” of ventriloquists, singing in harmony, generates an unusual response — felt as uncanny, but perhaps touchingly beautiful, in its own way. Another instance of popular folk art turning the uncanny toward alternative ends:

A public service announcement:The Addams Family is now streaming for FREE on YouTube, from MGM. A pastiche of horror fiction iconography — and also an indictment of the 50’s nuclear family, the conventions of the sitcom, and all things domestic — this show is perhaps one of the most interesting and clear-cut manifestations of the uncanny in popular culture. And it is still a riot.

On the Uncanny . . .

It is only this factor of involuntary repetition which surrounds what would otherwise be innocent enough with an uncanny atmosphere, and forces upon us the idea of something fateful and inescapable when otherwise we should have spoken only of ‘chance’…We do feel this to be uncanny. And unless a man is utterly hardened and proof against the lure of superstition, he will be tempted to ascribe a secret meaning to this obstinate recurrence of a number; he will take it, perhaps, as an indication of the span of life allotted to him.